We're not in Kansas Anymore, Toto.

What is this Coping thing, exactly?

First off, let me just tell you that somehow I don't think staying up until 10:30 watching fireworks has had a positive effect on my family today. We are all tired and cranky and the boys have tried to kill each other all day. I am not even kidding - I have had to actually separate their intertwined bodies punching, kicking and twisting all damn day.  We'd be going along decently (which is relative, I'm sure) and then one would say something to the other and suddenly it's WWF Smackdown, without the bleached hair and the bulging, steroid enhanced speedos. (Okay, maybe a little bit of bleached hair, they've been at the pool a lot.)

Anyway, I've been especially unable to deal with them today, and really have been that way since I got back into town on Wednesday. It's like I somehow thought that while I was gone they would miss me and therefore magically turn into well behaved children who say please and thank you and eat their peas without nagging. When the reality is they got their schedules turned upside down and sideways, and therefore the whining had reached a maximum pitch about the time that I returned, and has pretty much stayed at that level since.

I spent Friday cleaning the house, and sifting through closets and boxes, making piles of clothes to donate, trash, or hand down.  I had taken them to daycamp even though both my husband and I were off work for the official employee holiday.  That time should have given me a chance to gather myself, do some laundry, clean up, get organized, and feel at least a little bit in control, but it didn't work. I am completely unable to deal with my kids right now. And not only does that thought freak me out, I have no idea what to do about it.

I'm not sure when I stopped coping this round, but I think it was probably when school got out, and after we went to Alabama for Memorial Day weekend and came back with a truckload of stuff we now don't know what to do with. I had finally gotten into a groove with my new job, the boys activities were many but manageable, and I was working out regularly again.  All that went out the window with the end of the school year and the transition to day camp. 

I realized today that my dining room has become a depository of crap that I don't want to deal with. Same thing with the guest room, which is usually my haven, and my sewing room. You can't even get in 3 feet past the doorway without having to push a box of a pile of something out of the way.  The garage had been just as bad, mostly full of aforementioned furniture and boxes, but I finally got that down to a more manageable space, at least enough that I can park my car in the garage.  But it wasn't enough. I can't stand to go out there, I can't stand to walk past the dining room, I can't stand to shove my way past the crap in the guest room in order to water the poor ficus that sits in the window. But I can't bring myself to go in there and fix it, either.

I can't put my finger on why I'm so angry with my kids. I'm not sure why all I want to do is lay on the couch with the laptop warming my thighs and shop for ridiculous things on Overstock.com that I will never buy, instead of getting my ass in gear and emptying the dishwasher while I have a few minutes. And then, I don't know why I haven't been able to post here either, at this blog that has been the Keeper of my Crazy for the last four years. I visit the Typepad Compose Window all the time, and yet when I get there the cursor just blinks and I have nothing to say, nor the energy to figure out how to say it. I don't know why I feel like this blog nags me to write something although I have no desire to do so, and why the doorway in my brain that opens that cathartic journaling comfort that I seem to be craving is blocked with clean piles of 4T pants and shirts and giant Space Bags full of comforters that are open and spilling out onto the carpet.

From dictionary.com:

cope

 /koʊp/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [kohp]  Show IPA verb, coped, cop⋅ing.

Use cope in a Sentence

–verb (used without object)

1.	to struggle or deal, esp. on fairly even terms or with some degree of success (usually fol. by with): I will try to cope with his rudeness.

2.	to face and deal with responsibilities, problems, or difficulties, esp. successfully or in a calm or adequate manner: After his breakdown he couldn't cope any longer.

I don't know what happens next. I don't know how long I have to go before some sort of reflex kicks in and I drag my ass back up again. But right this second I have to go separate the warmongers (again), so I guess it will have to wait.

Greetings from the surface of the sun.

*wipes away cobwebs*
*vacuums up dead bugs"

Um, hai. I'm still alive, barely, as every time I step outside I stop breathing from the oppressive heat. So that's fun. It's so hot that I've stopped worrying about keeping my pasty, white body fat covered in jeans, even the capri pants are not cool enough, and have been running around in very little more than a jog bra and nylon shorts. It's that hot people - I don't even care anymore.

It's so hot I paid the neighbor kid to mow my lawn this morning, because I figured writing him a check for $35 is better than the $100 for the ambulance plus 80/20 after $500 deductible I would be paying for my husband to mow it tonight. Happy Father's Day late, honey.

So, I leave tomorrow morning for a nice jaunt down to Little Rock, Arkansas with the teenage youths from church. We will be learning what it's like to live in a third world country for a couple of days. And just to make the experience even more real, it will be around 100 degrees while we're there.

(Am kind of wishing I could pay the neighbor kid $35 to go for me.)

BRB.

Where I've been.

I led my two boys and a whole gaggle of their friends through Cub Scout Day Camp last week, and I'm still recovering. Recovering from the work that I missed, recovering from the severe thunderstorms that drove us from camp early and destroyed our tents on Tuesday morning, recovering from the tick that embedded his nasty little head into the soft flesh of my boob below the underwire of my bra. Asshole.

Advantages of Cub Scout Day Camp:

• $46 per week, per kid. Had I not been taking the week off to volunteer as their walking leader, I would have reveled in the cheap daycare, easily 1/3 what I pay for a normal week per kid in the summer.
• Watching boys be boys in their natural element - shooting BB guns and bow&arrows, catapults and slingshots.
• No need for makeup & hair. Just sunscreen and bug spray. 
• Wellies with shorts. It's a nice look. No, there's no pictures of that.

Disadvantages of Cub Scout Day Camp:

• Ticks. Specifically the one in my boob. I may have mentioned that already.
• There are no alcoholic beverages allowed at Cub Scout Day Camp.
• Golf-ball size hail is not repelled by nylon tent material.

Boys on the levee, overlooking the marsh that was the main field, Kings of Their Domain.

Monday.

 

3:45AM Husband’s alarm clock goes off, reminding him to get his ass up and out of bed, get showered and dressed and drive to the airport for a 5:58am flight to Atlanta. Daytrip, down and back same day, just for added sleep depravity.

5:15AM Wide awake. Sooo awake. Roll over and check the morning’s news on my phone, refusing to get up. Shut the hell up, baby birds in the raingutter.

7:45AM Oh, apparently I did go back to sleep. Now I’ve got to get up.

8:15AM Realize that I do not own a little black dress that fits my ass. Awesome.

8:45AM Think that perhaps I should feed the boys breakfast before we leave in 10 minutes for daycamp. Oh, and fix their lunch. Find the lunchboxes? And swimsuits.

9:10AM leave for daycamp.

9:15AM Beg the daycamp counselor for the extended care option just for the day. Also beg her to please transfer Drew from daycamp to swimteam practice (within the same facility) at 5pm.

9:30AM arrive at the Sprint Store, where they spend an hour and ten minutes working on fixing my phone. Again.

10:55AM arrive at work, just in time for an 11AM meeting.

12:15PM emerge from meeting. Give someone money to grab some lunch for me. Work on project that was due Friday.

1:03PM cram Subway sandwich in my craw, go to meeting still chewing.

1:30PM go back to working on overdue project.

2:15 leave project behind with someone else to work on, drive like a Banshee to an Episcopal church in downtown Kansas City, for a funeral.

2:18PM Identify what is rattling around on the floor of the car: the can of spray sunscreen that was supposed to go to daycamp with the boys. Realize they probably spent several hours at the pool without any sunscreen. Awesome.

3-4:45PM Funeral. High church, mass, communion, the whole nine yards. It is beautiful. Heartbreakingly, realize that a friend who is also attending the funeral is faced with answering the question "How are you?" with "Well, this morning I found out I have cancer."

5:02PM leave downtown. Or at least, get on the highway thinking I am leaving downtown, along with half the city.

5:37PM Arrive at back daycamp. Will melts down immediately, totally red-faced with sunburn. Drew is at swimteam practice, and you can see the red glow from his skin from underneath the water. Buy an extraordinarily overpriced mango smoothie with a protein boost and a Powerbar from the Café to try and stave off the melting down.

5:40PM sit in the shade by the side of the pool where swimteam is practicing. Take off shoes and breathe for a minute.

6:00PM Swimteam practice is over. Drew commences with the melting down.

6:10PM make a judgement call that soccer practice isn’t going to happen tonight.

6:35PM Arrive back at home, and decide that dinner will be a frozen pizza. Pour wine.

****

The good news is that I thought ahead and arranged for a neighbor kid to let the dog out mid-afternoon. I can’t remember to put sunscreen on my kids, but I can remember that the dog cannot go 10 hours without peeing.

 

 

 

 

Riding in cars with boys.

Last weekend we drove down to Alabama in the family minivan, rented a small Budget truck, cleaned out my in-laws house of furniture and things we wanted, and then drove back to Kansas City. This all happened between Thursday evening to Monday afternoon. My husband drove the truck back, and I drove the minivan, with both boys and the dog. It's a twelve hour drive, each way.

This was not a vacation. Well, I guess it sort of was for the boys, as they got to spend time with their cousins, whom they adore, for the first time since last 4th of July weekend. And despite loading fantastically heavy sofas and bed frames into a moving truck in the drizzling rain and Alabama humidity, it was kind of nice just to get out of town. The physical stress was actually kind of a nice, cathartic change of pace from the usual mental stress. Although there was plenty of mental stress to be had in the situation.

Cleaning out someone's home is a very weird thing. It feels like you're looting. When you're trying to take a detached, non-emotional look at whether or not someone else's things have value to you - Do we have a place for that? Would that fetch a decent price? - knowing that those things have/had emotional value to someone else, it is...weird. And exhausting. But that's really all I have to say about it.

On the way home we drove through some of the toughest weather I have ever had the displeasure of driving in.  Although I've made that trip several times, usually my husband is driving or we take turns. I've never had to do it by myself before, much less with a carload of cranky little boys who are very tired of the DVD selection you have on hand.  But we made it it, and we returned to our home in time to enjoy a drink with neighbors during Monday evening's Memorial Day culdesac party, and then start another crazy week.  School is out, summer break is here. Work is crazy busy. Life goes on.

Little acorns everywhere.

A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of frustration over something completely random, my 3rd grader blurted out to me "And ALSO? I can't see the board at school, and my teacher makes me sit in the back!"

My heart sank like a rock.  It was the same year in school for me, that it was discovered I could see precisely jack shit when it came to reading chalk scratches on a green board. And so, the summer between 3rd and 4th grade I got new glasses, along with a haircut that offered me no grace whatsoever, and showed up at school that fall looking like a totally different person. Before that year, the kids at school generally thought I was maybe a little weird, but likeable. After I got glasses, though, I was a little weird, AND I looked like a freak, and they had no problem making sure I knew it. Likeable no longer got me by, and so my self-esteem crashed like a Kamikaze into the beaches of Pearl Harbor.

I'm maybe still a little bitter about that.

Anyway, I'm please to tell you that the offering of glasses for kids is a totally different world than it was 30 years ago - they are cute! And have lots of personality. There wasn't a Buddy Holly coke-bottle frame to be seen.  So Drew picked out a pair of brown, slightly tortoise shell frames, and they will be ready in a week or so. His vision is not as bad as mine was initially, he only needs the glasses to read the board at school, or maybe to watch TV if there's small lettering like scoreboxes during a football game. He doesn't need them playing soccer. It will probably get worse each year for the next few years, but at least we got on it early enough that he hasn't fallen behind because of it.

PS - His teacher makes him sit in the back because he talks too much, too loudly, and can't stay in his seat for more than 2.8 seconds at a time. Yeah, he got that from me, too.

PPS - People, get your kids eyes checked, regularly. And not at the pediatrician's office, just during the annual check up. Go to an eye doctor. It makes a difference. Last August, the pediatrician did an eye test and told me his vision was 20/40, which is apparently on target for eight years old. I know a lot can change in a short time, but now he is 20/125 and 20/150. Big difference.

Friday wine goodness: Almost Famous.

So, last Sunday for Mother's Day I was on the local news for about 10 seconds, talking with my hands and saying something stupid about being on Twitter all the time, which of course they cut and ran with right before the other mom that was interviewed said something about how one can spend too much time on the internet enjoying the community of moms and, you know, forget about their families. I totally knew they would do something like that, but whatever, it was interesting anyway.

Anyway. This weekend my short reign of terror fame continues, as I plan to make an appearance at the Chicks Who Click Kansas City happy hour, and then of course attend the actual conference tomorrow.  This is what I love about social media/marketing/internet people.  Other trade organizations start out with the lectures and then have parties on the last evening.  Us social media types like to start drinking BEFORE the serious lectur-y learn-y stuff.  These are SO my people, you have no idea.  This is my tribe. Well, one of my tribes. I'm multi-tribal! (It's like multi-ethnic, only with a pasty white English girl. So, notsomuch.)

So that will be fun. I might even learn somethin'.  I'm also supposed to be writing an article for the Chicks Who Click blog about moms and social media. I guess I should get on that.

Rockin' in a Free World.

Well, Hi-dee-diddly-doo, neighbor.  Yeah, I'm still here, channeling Ned Flanders, because that's all my brain is currently capable of.  It's been one helluva a week my friends. The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and The Triumphant. But that's a story for another time. 

For now, I will redirect you over to Being Savvy Kansas City, where I am giving away tickets to KC Jiggle Jam, which is Memorial Day weekend. And Dan Zanes and Friends will be there. God love Dan Zanes, because seriously, if it weren't for him I'd have spent my kids' preschool years with my shoulders up around my ears while listening to The Wiggles in the minivan, and I just don't want to think about how much that would have cost me in visits to the chiropractor.

Where was I? Oh right. FREE TICKETS. Go on, git.

Reality Bites.

This has been a weird week. It's been raining so long I barely remember what the sun looks like. We've had both the heat and the air conditioner turned on, at different times in the last 7 days. And though I look at my calendar and wonder how the hell I'm going to get my kids to all their scheduled activities, because of the rain almost everything this week has been canceled, and we've had dinner sitting at the table in the kitchen together as a family, twice.

Like I said, weird. But nice.

Last Friday I spent the morning hitting the garage sales in the rich people neighborhoods nearby where we live, ending the morning sitting on a patio drinking margaritas for lunch.  That's about as good as it gets for me - rummaging through other people's cast-offs, while chatting with a close friend, and then eating on a patio in the sunshine with a drink.  It was a good day.  Although I did notice lots of For Sale signs in those neighborhoods, some of which were probably in foreclosure.

Later that evening, I drove down to a ministry seminar at St. Paul's School of Theology.  If you don't know, that place is in The Hood.  It's like this oasis of green grass and colonial brick that looks like a college campus sprouted up in the middle of the barrio, except it's been there longer than the surrounding neighborhood has been a barrio. Go figure.

As I drove toward the campus, after instinctively locking my doors and then feeling guilty about that, I started noticing that many of the little disheveled homes along the street had tons of stuff out on the curb and in the front yard: dressers, chairs, sofas, bed frames and mattresses, overstuffed boxes and trashbags.  At first I though, Huh, they must be having bulk trash pickup tomorrow morning.  After a little while I started looking at the houses themselves as I drove, instead of just the curb, and realized that many of the doors were taped, and signs posted.

It wasn't bulk item pickup day. It was evictions. House after house after tiny little broken down house, people's stuff thrown out in the yard - dressers and blankets and teddy bears - to be picked through by the vagrants. And another family seeking shelter on a pretty Friday night.

On the surface, there is a big difference between a rich family who loses their house to foreclosure, and a poor family who gets evicted and their stuff thrown out on the street like it's trash.  The rich people, perhaps because they have a higher level of education that money brings and access to lawyers and friends and family with means, have a better chance of moving out in a civilized manner, finding another place to live and putting their possessions in storage.  But it doesn't hurt any less, emotionally, to have to live through that.

We can sit here and say people made bad decisions - those rich people  never should have gotten so greedy and narcissistic and leveraged themselves into that marginal loan and built that gigantic castle on the sand in the first place. We can say that if those poor people had not been spending $7.50 a day on a pack of cigarettes, or maybe way more than that on an ounce of heroine, and had just kept getting one shitty job after another, that they could have paid their rent or their own little mortgage and made it work.

We can sit here and say it's their fault, certainly not ours.  But try and remember that the next time you go to use your credit card to buy something because you didn't have the cash in your wallet. We are all to blame for this economic catastrophe. Every single one of us. And I, for one, already have enough chinks in my own glass house. I'm done throwing rocks.

Twenty minutes in the mind of an ADHD mommy.

God, its gorgeous outside. I should be doing something outside.

I know!  I'll plant that 8 pack of petunias I bought at Costco last week. Awesome.

Hm, the potting soil is in the garage. I'll have to drag it to the deck.

Oh look, the dog puked on the deck. Better than in the house.

Okay, potting soil, check. Dog puke needs to get rinsed off. Water...oh right. Gotta de-winterize the hose nozzle and screw it on. 

Hmm, that hose leaks at the faucet, though. I need to find that Teflon tape stuff to wrap around it first. Wonder where that is. Garage maybe?

Not in the garage.  Oh wait, it's in my bathroom, from when we tried to fix the pipe under the tub and broke it worse. Right.  It's in a bathroom drawer, I'm sure of it.

What is this, Robitussin? From like 2005? We didn't even LIVE IN THIS HOUSE in 2005.  What else is expired in here? I'm going to have to dump out this entire drawer.

Why are there 13 empty but appear used quart-sized Ziplocs in this stupid drawer?

Really? Loose Tums in the drawer? Like I'm gonna eat those with hairy dust-bunnies all over them?

I have a new package of flushable wipes? Why?

Bug spray! There's the bug spray! I should put that downstairs so that I don't forget I have it and buy more when it comes time for Scout Camp.

Hey! There's the plant food spikes. I should feed the houseplants.

Wow. maybe I should water them first. Where's the watering can? 

They probably need to soak for a while.  I'll take them down to the deck and use the hose.

Er, right. Teflon tape.

Hmm, no Teflon tape. Okay, I'll just fill up the watering can for now.

Er, I need to change clothes. 

Dude, I should start some laundry. I don't have any clean t-shirts.

The kids probably don't have any clean clothes either. I'll do a load of whites.

Oh hey, there's that soccer sock I've been looking for. I wonder where the shin guard is. I need to find that before six o'clock.

CRAP. I have to go pick up the other kids at the after school club now. So much for planting.

Two Hours Later:

The drawer is still dumped out in the middle of the bathroom floor.
I never found the other shin guard.
The dog puke is dry.

And I don't know where I set down the bug spray.